How Much Money Does CPS Make Off Of Our Children?

This is the continuation of my series on the corrupt ways of CPS. This is a governmental agency, who basically answers to no one. They are running amuck, stealing children from their homes and selling the children into foster care. And when I say “selling the children into foster care”, that is literal. There is a law in place that actually pays the states cash bonuses to put children in the foster care system. They are paid even more bonuses for special needs children. This law, known as The Adoption and the Safe Families Act, is explained in more detail in the first post of this series called The Corrupt Business of Child Protective Services.

Every time CPS seizes a child, it gets money from the federal government. Critics continue to warn that this has a corruptive effect.

That’s why we have so many laws, and public and private agencies, set up specifically with the charge to protect children and maintain their safety. It’s exactly why so much funding is directed toward this goal.

But did you know that the money funneled to states and child protective services actually encourages them to accuse you of child abuse and even murder, and to take your children, even if you’re not guilty, and even though they have absolutely no proof that you harmed your child?”

The late North County Times journalist, John Van Doorn, who was a tireless advocate for parental and children’s rights, and who ran for San Diego Supervisor in 2010, was also been quoted as saying,

“Most people are not aware of how much profit many of these services provide the county. These profits are hard to ignore and even more difficult to pass up.

Counties can bring in thousands of dollars in excess revenue for each child in foster care — which means they have more incentive to remove children from their families than to keep families intact. “As such … our county government is a major factor in the dismantling of families and/or destruction of children’s lives.”

Michael Minkoff, is another father who alleges that his children were unjustly taken by CPS. He claims CPS standards for seizing children aren’t just governed by whether they’re abused, but also whether they’re “marketable.” His claim is:

“Do you know how many calls it took for someone to show up and take our beautiful white baby twin girls? One call. And CPS took them on the basis of one person’s testimony. And we were assumed guilty from the start. Three months later, the case was dismissed and not a single claim was upheld, yet LA County got three months worth of Federal money out of our kids, and so far, they got it with impunity. In fact, if it hadn’t been for God’s grace and good lawyers, we might have been fighting for much longer to no avail.”

In 2013, the Federal government started experimenting with a new funding schedule for CPS, known as the Title IV-E waiver. Before this experiment, the Federal foster care money was “uncapped” and more carefully allocated by the Federal government. At this time, LA County was retaining about 73% of the children it took into custody. The official reason for this extreme policy was that these abused children were all “much better off in foster care.”

PoliticalOutCast.com had an interesting article regarding the waiver. They had the following information:

When California opted in to the experimental Title IV-E waiver, CPS ideology started to shift. Pretty much immediately. The Title IV-E waiver sets the Federal money to a lump “not-to-exceed” amount for each child in foster custody. It seems like this would be bad as far as CPS is concerned. In fact, the Chicago Tribunepublished an article criticizing the Title IV-E waiver. According to the synopsis, kids were being returned to abusive parents because their wasn’t enough money to keep them in custody:

The number of foster children has dropped [in LA County] from 52,000 in 1997, to 18,800 this year. During this period, the department has focused on keeping children with their parents by giving the adults drug treatment, parental training and other services.

The drive has been motivated by the belief that a child’s welfare is best served by his or her own family, even when that family is somewhat troubled. But the reduction of foster children is also a budgetary imperative.

Under an experimental federal and state program known as the Title IV-E waiver, Los Angeles County agreed to accept a fixed sum for foster care.

If costs exceed that amount, the county must pay the difference.

Guess what? CPS has agreed to the waiver and now defend it, but not because of the upstanding reasons you may think.

The waiver money is almost entirely string-free – counties have much more flexibility in how they choose to spend it, and they are actually getting more money to do less work!

No one wants to say the obvious truth: CPS has no moral or ideological convictions other than doing whatever it takes to keep making money and exercising power. Therefore, they adopt ideologies that justify the actions that most support their financial interests.

When CPS made more money taking children, their official policy was: abused children are better off in custody. But now, they make more money returning the children, and therefore their official policy is: children are better off being reunited with their parents.

This amounts to a pretty much total turnaround of CPS’s purported ideology. This turnaround would be puzzling if you didn’t know all along what their real ideology was: make more money.

So now, under the Title IV-E waiver, Child Protective Services will take children for a smaller amount of time, get the maximum allotted dollar amount, and return the children before they have to pay anything out of the county coffers. Easier money. And more of it. This all makes me a little sick to my stomach.

This petition is for California, however, you do not have to be a California resident to sign.

The petition states this:

On January 13, 2011, California legalized attorney malpractice. This was not an act of the California Legislature, but instead resulted from the California Supreme Court decision in Cassel v. Superior Court, which concluded that California’s mediation confidentiality statutes, enacted by the Legislature in 1997 legalizes attorney malpractice.

This ruling has altered the traditional fiduciary role attorneys have with their clients, allows California attorneys to betray their clients, act in their own interests or those of others without oversight or accountability and with impunity all at client expense. Parties to disputes in California who choose to mediate their disputes are given no notice of this significant change in the law.